Such Is Life In The Friend-Zone
by OtakuGuy10
Summary: PLOT: After a sudden apocalyptic catastrophe, Tomoko Kuroki finds herself the last remaining human left on Earth.
1. Chapter 1

Such is Life in the Friend-Zone

A Watamote fan-fic by: Otakuguy10

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN WATAMOTE! THIS IS MERELY A FANFIC!

PLOT: After a sudden apocalyptic catastrophe, Tomoko Kuroki finds herself the last remaining human left on Earth.

CHAPTER ONE

"Strange…"

"It's been more than two months since I've seen another living soul…"

Tomoko Kuroki, a 15 year-old Japanese High-School girl, sat alone in what was once her busy, bustling classroom. She occupied a chair in the rear-most row next to the window peering outside. There wasn't much to look at through the windows anymore, and while the desk had been hers before all this happened, Tomoko felt at ease.

It started out just like any other morning; except that particular Monday was her first Monday of High-School classes.

Her first day as a real HSG.

She rose up in her bed. The (rather sweat-soaked) yellow comforter fell and bunched around her waist. Her alarm-clock read "6:00AM" and for some reason did not go off. Whatever, Tomoko thought. She was just glad she wasn't going to be late for her very first day of school. Most mornings, or at least many mornings, Tomoko felt like a zombie risen from the grave subsequent to waking up. Eagerly, she threw back the covers, threw her legs out, and practically jumped up.

After brushing her teeth, combing her hair and narrowly deciding against a shower (she didn't need one quite yet) she rushed down to the kitchen table to get some breakfast.

Weird, her brother, or even her mother for that matter were not there. Were they still asleep? As concerned as Tomoko was, she could not afford to waste on this very important morning.

Her breakfast seemed…different, off somehow. As tasty as it may have been, it left an empty hole in her stomach. Bro and mom still were nowhere to be found. What were they doing? It was Monday morning; they should be up and at 'em by now. Tomoko almost considered going back upstairs to check on them, but school was going to start in 30 minutes, and it took her a good 15 to walk there, so she had better get going.

"Bye, mom! Bye bro!" Tomoko gaily called into her seemingly empty house before closing the door and strolling off.


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

Tomoko did not live on a particularly busy street, but still close enough to a larger intersection so that she should have been able to hear the industrial indistinct of honking, revving, and coming and going automobiles.

But she did not.

This was usually the first thing Tomoko heard as she left the house. If, for whatever reason, things were quieter than usual, the next noise she usually heard was any random pair of stray cats (there were quite a few of them in this town) going at it.

But she didn't hear their mewling, either.

It was at this point that Tomoko began to feel like something might be…wrong.

The school-girl stopped in her tracks and looked around.

"Weird…where is everyone…"

At this close proximity to the school Tomoko should have encountered at least one other fellow student going the same way as she.

As per how her day was going thus far, she seemed to be alone in the town.

Tomoko's concern slowly began to turn from mild wonder to moderate worry.

Regardless, she continued on until she arrived at the main gates of her new High School. A stately, if not imposing and institutional brick border surrounded the perimeter of the school's grounds. The iron gate had been opened so that the students could enter.

Tomoko stood at the gate like a yellow-clad statue, looking up at it, her uniform dress billowing in the light summer breeze.

The gate was a metaphorical and literal crossroads in her life. It was the last barrier to be overcome before becoming a genuine HSG.

Boundaries would be breached.

Hormones and passions would run wild.

Walls just like this one would eventually come crumbling down.

"I have a feeling that today is gonna be alright…" Mused the youth as she tightened her backpack straps and crossed the threshold into her new high-school life.

She had almost forgotten about how weird her walk there had been.


	3. Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

In the time since that day, that dawn of a new world, Tomoko Kuroki had tried to deal with her "new" life as best she could. It did not turn out quite how she had expected, but one thing was certain: It was not going to be easy.

Tomoko sat solemnly at her desk for what might as well have been an eternity before slowly rising up and walking into the abandoned hallway.

Quiet. Alone. Empty.

A thick coating of dust, grey as the circles lining her stressed eyes, had settled onto all available surfaces. Tomoko walked over to the wide open windows along the outside wall. The view outside yielded a dying world. Decrepit buildings in varying states of ruin and decay. Towering office buildings being reclaimed by nature, returning to the Earth from which they sprouted. A number of cars and other vehicles parked in the middle of the road.

The cars indicated no signs that their previous owners were still around. In fact, they looked liked they had just rolled off the assembly line. Not a single human finger seemed to have ever made contact with these ominous machines. For whatever it was worth, the only purpose that these relics of the past seemed to serve was to prove to someone or something, prove to the whole of existence, to some great cosmic being from another plane of reality that creatures called human beings once lived and thrived on a planet called Earth.

Tomoko sighed and fished her cell-phone out of her coat pocket and flipped it open.

A blank, black screen.

Nothing.

Electricity had stopped working a long time ago, so charging a cell-phone was pretty much impossible.

She still tired plugging it in every once in a while. Just in case.

Based on an old calendar Tomoko carried with her in her backpack (along with her school-books, but why bother with keeping them?) she had been able to deduce that the year was at least 2010 but no later than 2019, the month as perhaps October (it was getting colder) and anymore precise than that, such as the day of the week, was fuzzy and hard to determine.

She wondered if the date really mattered. If anything ever really mattered at all.

Like that one Freddy Mercury song.

The dark-haired teen raised a hand to the cold, uncomfortable glass and pressed her palm against it. She let it fall limply back down to her side. A ghostly, greasy hand-print remained.

"Another sign that I was here…" Tomoko said, almost forming a smile on her thin lips, proud of her handiwork. "I have left my mark on this world…"

A series of potent, loud sneezes suddenly overcame her. The flat, harsh sounds echoed off the walls and traveled down the hallways, going God-knows where.

Tomoko drifted out of the school and onto the side-walk outside.

It had been close to a year since this all began. The urgent needs of the human body, namely food and drink, were not hard to satisfy. Tomoko lived comfortably on canned goods, granola bars and other assorted nuts and berries, and the necessity of water (as well as more luxurious drinks like soda, tea, and fruit or vegetable juices) was still abundant.

Adult beverages, too, were consumed by the young girl.

Tomoko quite enjoyed drinking alcohol. It always gave her a rebellious rush to drink with as much abandon as she felt like at any given time and not having any adults around to reprimand her about it.

She had a bad time when she once waltzed into one of Japan's oldest Whisky distilleries and, on a whim, decided to honor the long-gone brew-master by sampling some of the things that he had dedicated his life to making and mastering.

Tomoko found she liked the stuff a little too much.

About half a bottles'-worth of shots later, the booze hit her all at once like the Second Impact. Tomoko wobbled out of the building (knocking over a rack of who-knows how much valued whisky) and proceeded to vomit in the middle of the road.

She had never felt so vulnerable, so alone, so helpless, as she did at that moment.

She stumbled into a nearby residence (who once lived here, she wondered?) and fell down onto their bed and cried for her mother.

When she woke up the next morning (or however long she was out) Tomoko swore off hard liquor for good, but she still had a beer every once in a while.


	4. Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

This lifestyle, even at the end of the world, seemed bizarre in its own right. How long, Tomoko wondered, could she keep it up? She had raided through most of the nearby convenience stores for food and drink. Plenty of non-perishable goods were still yielded by the larger grocery stores and supermarkets in the area, despite them reeking like abominable compost piles due to the once-fresh produce sections and meat departments rotting. Tomoko still held her nose and ran in there to get the things which she needed to sustain herself. Occasionally she nabbed some new clothes or armfuls of manga if she felt like it.

It was so surreal, yet entertaining, this concept of practically looting a store and being able to get away with it scot free.

She did, however, sometimes leave some money on the conveyor-belt next to the cash-register.

Tomoko was not without some morality.

While the still steady supply of food was only a minor concern for Tomoko, what really worried her was her crushing loneliness, which seemed to worsen with each passing day.

She missed so many people: her mother, her little brother, (even though they never got along back then she would be overjoyed to see him now) her little cousin Ki, and long-lost friends from worlds gone by.

Sometimes, she even wished her obnoxious class-mates were still around. That way, she would at least have "something" to listen to, even if it was their arrogant, pompous babbling on about going to karaoke after school, how someone looked like ass in that picture, or how they still hadn't studied for tomorrow's exams.

At least then, there would be more to listen to than the sound of her own breathing, her own internal thoughts, or her talking to herself, which was pretty much the only way she could have a "normal" human conversation with someone, even if that someone was herself.

Counting the days.

For what?

What was going to happen in however many days?

Would these days ever end?

Was Tomoko condemned to live as long as space and time itself, as limited by human science these things might be?

Such deep, existential thoughts for a young girl to have.

Tomoko wondered if she was going insane.


	5. Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

It had snowed overnight while Tomoko was asleep.

She rose up in her bed, letting the comforter bunch around her thin body. She blinked absently at the mirror on the wall in front of her.

She was getting skinnier and skinnier all the time. She looked as though she too were dying with the world.

Food was getting scarce, and the biting cold did not help.

The withering school-girl swung her spindly legs over the side of the bed (she had holed up for the night in a high-end hotel room where, according to the room's description, the rate had been around $250 dollars per night without taxes) and trudged over the plush carpeting to the window and pulled the curtains back.

She was nearly blinded by the sudden flood of pure, white snow coating everything and the sun shining off of it.

"It snowed…" Tomoko said to herself, admitting the obvious.

The lone gal put on her winter clothes (she had since abandoned her soiled and worn school-uniform, but still held onto the red necktie in her back-pack as a keepsake from the world before) and prepared to venture out into the cold, barren world in search of food and water.

Her furry mukluk style boots crunched in the powdery snow on her way to the nearby gas station to scavenge for food, although she had already picked the place clean.

It was bone-chillingly cold. The sharp wind poked right through her padded parka, stung her face, made her plaid scarf flap wildly in the wind.

Maybe, just maybe, there was something she missed: a single lone candy bar, a can of corn, a bag of chips. Something to hold her over for just a little bit longer.

Tomoko knew that there were more foodstuffs in other convenience stores further into the city, but she didn't think she could make it in this cold.

She walked through the sliding doors (she had to manually push them aside) of the shop and started rummaging.

She found nothing.

Disheartened, Tomoko made for the exit of the run-down shop, accidentally stepping on a CD case on the way and cracking it.

She looked down curiously at the thing whose breaking snap startled her so much she actually jumped and flinched a bit. That noise of breaking plastic had been the most exciting thing to happen to her in a long time.

"Radiohead…" Tomoko read the title aloud, noting the yellow flower design on the cover.

She had entirely forgotten that flowers once existed. The picture on the floor was like a fantasy.

Back out into the cold she went. But where to? What was there to do at the end of the world when there was not even a single thing to eat? Yes, one could survive on water alone for a few days or so, which she had been doing for as long as she could, but Tomoko felt she could not go on for much longer if she did not find something to eat.

Tomoko made her way into the center of town, knowing there had to be something to eat somewhere in a store, a restaurant, something.

Her energy was gone. She collapsed onto her hands and knees in the snow, which for some reason didn't feel quite as cold as it should have.

"This is it…" She realized. "This is the end…"

Tomoko could feel her end coming, it was here. Yet she felt at peace; happy even. This baneful life was going to be over very soon, and this fact comforted her. No longer would she have to survive on uncooked spam eaten right out of the can with a fork, bottled water that tasted of plastic, or carrying on elaborate conversations with her emoji beanbag pillow she carried in her bag.

She serenely accepted her fate, and made peace with God. (If he even still existed)

There was a voice from somewhere behind her.


	6. Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

Tomoko raised her head back up. She wasn't sure is she was hearing imaginary things or if some angel from heaven had been sent down to scoop her back up into the skies.

But she thought she recognized the voice, so it couldn't have been her own shattered sanity.

She almost fearfully peered behind her, half-expecting some terrible, Lovecraftian monstrosity to be coming at her.

But what she saw was something Tomoko thought had disappeared long ago.

It might as well have been an angel.

It was Yu Naruse, Tomoko's old Middle-School friend.

Tomoko felt as though she would keel over right then and there, from a thousand different emotions flooding into her mind all at once. It couldn't be her. It was extraordinary enough to see another living, breathing, existing human being for the first time in years, but how on Earth could it have been Yu, of all people?

The blonde teenager ran through the drifting snow towards the collapsed Tomoko. She stopped in front of her prostrate friend, and caught her breath.

"I must be dreaming…" Tomoko said, looking up at Yu, certain she had already passed into the next world.

"Yes, you are…" Mused and smiled Yu. "But you must awaken…" The happy, contented teen seemed entirely unaffected by this empty world and what life in it does to someone. She stood in front of Tomoko like a monolith, an obelisk, of humanity.

"If you are here with me in this world, then I don't want to wake up…" Tomoko's heart thundered in her chest, but it was with gladness that it hammered away.

"This isn't the time for sleep, Mokocchi-Chan…" Yu looked down at the pitiful teen at her feet, and put out a bare, ungloved hand. "I've been following you, you know…" She revealed.

"B…but how did you find me? Why didn't you come to me until just now?" Tomoko asked helplessly, if not somewhat irate that someone, let alone Yu herself, had been out there, following her, able to help her but choosing not to.

"I began my search for you at our school. I thought that would be a good place to start, and it was. I found your hand-print, Mokocchi-Chan…" Tomoko's eyes widened with pleasant surprise. She had "not" been abandoned after all! Her timid, teenaged heart fluttered underneath her bulky winter jacket.

"I…I don't know what do to, or even what to say…" Tomoko confessed.

"You don't have to do anything right now if you don't want to, Mokocchi-Chan…but you must come with me…"

"Wh…where are we going?" Tomoko said without thinking about the words coming out of her mouth as she instinctually rose up her hand and took it in Yu's.

"We're going home, Tomoko Kuroki…" Yu said and smiled cutely, giggling a bit at the same time. She helped her dark-haired friend to her feet (she felt so light she almost didn't make an effort to get up she floated up) and before another word could be produced by either of the two embracing girls, Tomoko's vision faded to black. (Or was it to white, to blankness? It was hard to tell…)


	7. Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN

"BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!"

Tomoko awoke with a startled jolt, her green eyes snapping open to a view of her ceiling. Still in a half-asleep daze, she turned her head on her pillow to gaze at her buzzing alarm clock.

"SAT, 6:00AM"

She blinked a few times, rose up in her bed, and threw the covers off of her. She stretched and let out a lengthy yawn that, had it been any wider, would have permanently stretched out her mouth. Tomoko sat on the edge of her bed, trying to recall an intensely vivid, almost tangible dream she had conjured during the night.

She rose up and walked over to the window, and pulled the shades away.

The rising sun was just barely materializing on the horizon, casting its orange glow on the first few lines of roofs and telephone poles off in the distance.

She suddenly remembered why she had gotten up so early on a Saturday morning, and her drowsiness gave way to eager excitement.

Her old middle-school friend, Yu, had called her yesterday after school and wanted to meet up and hang out today, just like they did all those innocent years ago.

They weren't supposed to meet up until 4:00PM, but such a special occasion like this called for preparation. Tomoko showered, (first time in a few days) brushed her teeth, and looked into the bath-room mirror.

"Man, those dark circles underneath my eyes make me look really old and haggard…" She thought to herself.

"Maybe I should change my appearance a bit…"

THE END.


End file.
